Bret Davis (2007:5-9) – vontade

Let us begin with the term “will.” What is the will? As heirs of the modern Western philosophical tradition, we tend to understand the will as a “faculty of the subject,” to be distinguished from “thinking” or “feeling.” To be sure, a standard historical introduction to the notion of will in the West would involve an examination beginning at least with the ancient Greeks, perhaps asking why they had not yet “discovered” the unity of this faculty.¹ One might then move on to the gradual piecing together of the faculty of the will in the Stoics, and then to its first unified appearance in Augustine’s voluntas.² Next, one might consider the debates in Scholastic theology over whether the faculty of will or that of intellect is the “higher faculty.” After working through Kant’s critical delimitations of the spheres proper to each faculty, one could argue, against both irrational voluntarism and disengaged intellectualism, for a balance of powers. Since on this account the faculty of the will could be shown to be the backbone of action, any predilection for “non-willing,” such as Heidegger’s thought of Gelassenheit, might then be criticized as yet another reoccurrence of the old philosopher’s prejudice for “thinking” over “acting,” a prejudice harmless enough in the ivory tower but dangerous to the political sphere (6) which requires not only thought but also action and thus will,³ This is, in fact, roughly the manner in which Hannah Arendt analyzes the will,

Yet despite Arendt’s illuminating account of the relation between the faculties of thought and will (unfortunately she died before finishing the third part of her study, which would have treated the faculty of judgment) through the history of philosophy, if we are to pursue Heidegger’s path of rethinking the will, we must more radically call into question the traditional assumption that the will is simply a “faculty of the subject,” To begin with, what if it were the case that something akin to the opposite were true — that subjectivity is rather, as it were, a “faculty of the will”? What if the will underlies the subject, and not vice versa? In other words, what if it were the case that thinking in terms of a subject who possesses faculties, a “subject who wills,” already involves a particular willful mode of being-in-the-world? That is, what if the very ontology which sets up a subject who stands over against a world of objects, to which it then reaches out by means of faculties, powers of representational thought and volitional action, is itself determined by a willful manner of being and thinking?

This, indeed, is the direction of questioning which Heidegger’s thought engenders, He writes:

By the word “will” I mean, in fact, not a faculty of the soul, but rather — in accordance with the unanimous, though hardly yet thought-through doctrine of Western thinkers — that wherein the essence of the soul, spirit, reason, love, and life are grounded. (GA77:78)

Rather than seeing willing and thinking as separate and competing faculties, Heidegger attempts to show that traditional (especially modern) thinking, as representing, is a kind of willing: “Thinking is willing, and willing is thinking” (GA30:59). His own task, as we shall see, is to attempt a thinking which “is something other than willing” (ibid,), not because it chooses the one faculty over the other, and not because it is a mere passivity — indeed Heidegger sometimes suggests that genuine thinking involves “a higher activity (ein höheres Tun)” (GA33:61) — but because such thinking, together with “dwelling” and “building,” would be other than willing, Before broaching this question of “non-willing,” however, we need to get clear on what is meant by the term “will,”

What then is the will if not first of all a faculty of the subject? Let me introduce a certain interpretive extrapolation at this point, I suggest that we can understand the notion of will by way of what Heidegger calls a “fundamental attunement” (Grundstimmung). Let us develop the sense in which this interpretive connection of terms is intended here, Heidegger writes:

(7) An attunement is a way (eine Weise) … in the sense of a melody that does not merely hover over the so-called proper being at hand of humans, but that sets the tone for such a being, i.e., attunes and determines the manner and way (Art und Wie) of their being. . . . (Attunement) is . . . the fundamental manner in which Dasein is as Dasein (die Grundweise, wie das Dasein als Dasein ist). . . . (It) is not — is never — simply a consequence or side-effect of our thinking, doing, and letting. It is — to put it crudely — the presupposition for such things, the “medium” within which they first happen. (GA29-30:101; see also GA9:110/87)

In another text Heidegger writes:

A deep-rooted and very old habit of experience and speech stipulates that we interpret feelings and attunements (Gefühle und Stimmungen) — as well as willing and thinking — in a psychological-anthropological sense as occurrences and processes within an organism. . . . This also means that we are “subjects,” present at hand, who are displaced into this or that attunement (Stimmung) by “getting” them. In truth, however, it is the attunement that displaces us, namely into this or that understanding or disclosure of the world, into such and such a resolve or occlusion of one’s self, a self which is essentially a being-in-the-world. (GA45:161)

Although Heidegger does not usually explicitly connect the notion of Grundstimmung with that of the will, at one point in his analysis of Nietzsche’s conception of will — the conception which most directly influenced his own — he writes the following:

Will is command. . . . In commanding, “the innermost conviction of superiority” is what is decisive. Accordingly, Nietzsche understands commanding as the fundamental attunement of one’s being superior (die Grundstimmung des Überlegenseins)…. (GA6T1:N1 651/152)

Although in at least this passage Heidegger does explicitly refer to the will as a fundamental attunement, I shall not pursue further here the textual question of the relation between the two terms in Heidegger’s corpus.⁴ My point is that an entry into what Heidegger understands by the notion of will, the sense in which he does not mean by it one “faculty of the subject” among others, can be gained by way of thinking the will as a fundamental attunement.

A fundamental attunement is a comportment “prior to” the determination of any subject, object, or intentional relation between them. We cannot, therefore, begin by defining the will as a faculty of the subject, because (8) our thinking in terms of a “subject equipped with faculties for confronting the world” is dependent on a certain already “willful” mode of being-in-the-world, Part of what is at stake in Heidegger’s critique of the will is to see that the very understanding of the being of beings in terms of “subjects” and “objects” is implicated in a particular willful Grundstimmung. Only within this particular fundamental attunement does it make sense to speak of the subjective act of willing or of “the faculty of the will.” A fundamental attunement would be “fundamental” in the sense that it first opens (one) up (to) a world, prior to the determination of “who” is opened up to “what.” We reflectively find ourselves always already involved in such an attunement, just as we perceptively find the world always already disclosed through such an attunement. A willful fundamental attunement first determines the ontology wherein a subject is open to a world of objects in such a manner that the “open to” of this relation is distorted (constricted) into the representation of objects present-at-hand, if not indeed into the securing of a totality of materials ready for willful manipulation. Heidegger, in fact, goes even “further” than this in his determination of the term “will.” The will, for the later Heidegger, is not only a matter of the fundamental attunement of the subject who seeks to dominate the world; it is, prior still, the name for the being of beings in the epoch of modernity. Thus he writes:

The will in this willing does not mean here a faculty (Vermögen) of the human soul … ; the word “willing” here designates the being of beings as a whole. Every single being and all beings as a whole have their essential powers (das Vermögen seines Wesens) in and through the will, (WhD 35/91)

For Heidegger, the fundamental attunement (Grundstimmung) of man’s historical essence is in turn determined (bestimmt) by a “sending of being,” This sending (Seinsgeschick) is always a granting-in-withdrawal, and thus always involves an interplay of revealing/concealing; yet in the modern epoch of will this occurs as an extreme self-withholding of being, a denial which abandons man to the fundamental (dis)attunement of will.

A turn to the “proper fundamental attunement” of non-willing could, then, only take place by way of a turning in the sending of being. The crucial question of how man is to “participate” in this sending — and specifically of how he is to “wait for,” “prepare for,” or “cor-respond to” the turning — shall be a central concern of this study. It may turn out that we need to think in terms of a “double genitive” in the turning to non-willing as a “fundamental a-tunement of man”; or rather, as with the case of the (9) “thinking of being” (see GA9:313ff./239ff.), it may be necessary to liberate ourselves from the very framework of the subject/predicate grammar that compels us to think in terms of a dichotomy between an active agent and a passive recipient.